I finished repairing the sprinkler system in the front yard, and surprisingly it went well. My yard is split in two by a sidewalk leading to the front door, and the sprinkler system is comprised of two separate systems, one for each side. It took almost an entire evening to fix the north side of the system. That side was completely torn out by a backhoe up to the shutoff valve near the foundation of the house, so I had to start from scratch. I was able to find pre-cut and threaded lengths of pipe that just happened to be the right length for that side. When I got done, two of the sprinkler heads extended about an inch too high, so I had to wait until the next day to buy shorter pipe nipples and replace them.
The south side only took me an hour and a half to repair. Its only problem was that a street elbow had been broken off where it was threaded into a tee, but the threads remained inside the tee. In order to remove the tee I had to dig up 10′ of pipe to find the nearest union. Then I removed the union, replaced the tee and installed a new street elbow, and installed a new union to replace the old rusted one. I lucked out that none of the existing pipes were too rusted to reuse. Having to replace them would have been much more difficult.
I think there’s too much dirt in the yard to lay sod, so this evening Traci and I are going to remove about an inch of the existing clay soil, then rake in some soil conditioner and fertilizer and lay the sod. The yard is tiny–only 540 square feet–so the sod will be cheap and the job shouldn’t take too long. The cost is definitely worth avoiding the hassle of planting grass from seed.